Recycling prices and market commentary: 9 July 2021

July 9, 2021

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It was another week of mostly stable prices, but driven by a great deal of uncertainty in the recycling market.

For plastics, the uncertainty is particularly acute, as there are fears that companies could buy PRNs or PERNs and suddenly find them cancelled and all of the strong financial implications of that.

This has been compounded by the news that Plasgran, which as a major UK plastics recycler was also a seller of PRNs, has had its accreditation changed to ‘cancelled’ on the NPWD database. The reasons why this has occurred are not clear as yet, but it has caused a lot of speculation.

For paper, it seems markets are waiting to see which way to move based on whether and where demand is coming from.

Some industrial metal grades saw some movement upwards though.

This stability was also seen in the FX markets with the dollar and pound trading still at $1.37 this week, and the euro was at €1.16 again.

Recycled plastics

As mentioned above, there is a lot of uncertainty in the recycling market at the moment, with plastics feeling it most acutely.

With PRN/PERN revenue making up quite a chunk of a plastic packaging recycling company’s bottom line, there is fear that the market will be affected by PRNs getting cancelled and nobody is quite sure what will happen as a result of this.

Details also remain sketchy about why Plasgran has had its accreditation cancelled on the NPWD database, and what this will mean for the market.

This week saw the price of the PRN/PERN come off by £10, but with demand still good for most packaging grades, prices of physical materials remained where they had been the week before. One exception to this was HDPE bottles, where it went up by a further £10 per tonne, with demand especially good for these.

Forecast prices

	1-week	4-week
PET	305-311	301-307
HDPE	551-557	545-551
LDPE 98/2	355-361	352-358

Recycled paper

The uncertainty in the recycling market meant that it was a relatively stable week this week for prices.

Those buying OCC for South East Asian were less active than in previous weeks, and this helped to keep a lid on rising prices, especially as European interest in this grade also appears weaker.

Mixed saw good demand from European buyers, but there is a sense here too of starting to wind down ahead of the summer break.

For the time being, most see the recovered fibre market being relatively stable for the rest of the month, but are not sure what will happen once buying starts for August and beyond.

Forecast prices

	1-week	4-week
OCC	158-162	155-159
ONP	147-151	144-148
Mixed	117-121	114-118

Recycled metal

Greater movement on the LME saw copper up by £100 per tonne, aluminium up by £50 per tonne and brass by £50 per tonne. Ferrous metals and aluminium and steel cans saw no change though.